No, not for their two years together with the Golden State Warriors, the 40-year-old’s first NBA head-coaching experience.

Not even for having hired Mike Montgomery, who with each loss is making Musselman look like a better coach.

Rather, the man fired as head coach of the Warriors on May 20 wants to say thanks for trading one of his favorite players, Erick Dampier, to a team in the Central time zone, the same one in which Musselman currently resides.

It makes watching the big guy on television and still getting to bed at a reasonable hour a realistic option a couple of times most weeks.

“Damp and I had a relationship that really grew as time went along,” Musselman said of the career underachiever he helped develop into a $73 million free agent last summer. “He and I have a friendship, not just a player-coach relationship. Since I’ve been fired, we’ve talked on five or six different occasions.”

Hired 16 games into the season by the Memphis Grizzlies to be Mike Fratello’s chief assistant, Musselman returns to Oakland as an NBA employee for the first time tonight since his off-season dismissal.

What he’ll see from the second seat on the visitors’ bench is a Warriors club that’s struggling, losers of four in a row to fall to 7-18 and currently situated farther under .500 than at any point in Musselman’s first season.

When asked if he retained a greater affinity for the Warriors than your average NBA team, Musselman responded like along-suffering fan.

“I pay a tremendous amount of attention to certain guys,” he said. “I’m a huge fan of Speedy Claxton. I’m a huge Erick Dampier fan. When those guys are playing and I have the dish on, I watch them.

“Earl Boykins in Denver, same thing. And I watch a lot of Washington games because I really enjoy watching Gilbert (Arenas) and Antawn (Jamison) play.”

Well, at least Speedy is still with the team. And if the aptly named Warriors point guard is too much for the Grizzlies to handle tonight, that’ll be Fratello’s headache, not Musselman’s.

In his quest to be an NBA head coach again someday, Musselman recognizes being one seat in from the end of the bench has its advantages.

“Nobody knows all the things that go through a head coach’s mind — the emotions of every basket, the pressures leading up to a game, what happens after a game …,” he claimed. “It’s a whole lot easier falling asleep after a game when you’re an assistant coach. You’re asleep by 11:30. When you’re the head coach, you don’t get to sleep until 5 or 6 in the morning.

“I really admire people who are able to slide over and have never been a head coach before. It’s a lot harder than most people realize.”

Musselman, either the youngest or second-youngest head coach during his entire two-year stint in Oakland, believes he’ll get another chance to sit in the hot seat. That’s why he jumped at the opportunity to hook on with Fratello when it seemed he was enjoying himself as a radio analyst for ESPN while still collecting checks from the Warriors.

“I was totally fine with what I was doing,” he noted. “I enjoyed the ESPN stuff — in and out of arenas, spending time with my family …

“This is just a situation where Memphis has a good team, and they have an excellent coach I could learn from. I learned a tremendous amount the one year I worked under Chuck Daly. As an assistant coach, there’s nothing better than learning from great coaches. I’ve always thought Mike Fratello is as good a coach as there is.”

There are those who believe Musselman, whose Warriors teams won a respectable 75 games the past two seasons, was a pretty good coach while in Oakland. There’s still some head-scratching over why he wasn’t given a third season, especially after key injuries derailed last year’s hopes.

Was it his unwillingness to work in harmony with the front office? His inability to connect with some players? His lack of respect for Mike Dunleavy’s abilities?

Or was it as simple as missing the playoffs two years in a row?

If Musselman knows the chief reason he was canned, he’s not going public with it.

“We had two great years here,” he assured. “Myself and the guys on my staff are proud of the jobs that we did. I feel lucky to have gotten an opportunity at a young age.”

(Click here if you are unable to view this photo gallery on your mobile device) The Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek celebrates the life of its founder Ruth Bancroft who died at 109 on November 26, 2017. The Ruth Bancroft Garden is a nonprofit public dry garden that was planted by Mrs. Ruth Bancroft in 1972 and was opened to the...